MICHAEL MOORE, who carries around controversy the way Paul Bunyan toted an ax, has won legions of fans for being a ball-cap-wearing fly in the ointment of Republican politics. For tweaking the documentary form. Even for making millions of dollars in the traditionally poverty-stricken genre of nonfiction film.

Many despise him for the same reasons.

The Toronto-based documentary filmmakers Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk started out in the first camp. But during the course of making an unauthorized film about Mr. Moore they wound up somewhere in between. In the process, their experience has added a twist to the long-running story of an abrasive social critic who has frequently been criticized from the right, but far less often, as is the case with Ms. Melnyk and Mr. Caine, from his own end of the political spectrum.

“What he’s done for documentaries is amazing,” said Ms. Melnyk, 48, a native of Toronto and a freelance TV producer, who even now expounds on the good he says Mr. Moore has done. “People go to see documentaries now and, as documentary makers, we’re grateful.”

But according to Mr. Caine, 46, an Ohio-born journalist and cameraman, the freewheeling persona cultivated by Mr. Moore, and the free-thinking rhetoric expounded by his friends and associates were not quite what they encountered when they decided to examine his work. “As investigative documentarists we always thought we could look at anything we wanted,” Mr. Caine said. “But when we turned the cameras on one of the leading figures in our own industry, the people we wanted to talk to were like: ‘What are you doing? Why are you throwing stones at the parade leader?’ ”

Their film “Manufacturing Dissent” will have its premiere on March 10 at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Tex. To say it sheds an unflattering light on Mr. Moore — whose work includes the hit “Fahrenheit 9/11” and the Oscar-winning “Bowling for Columbine” — would be an understatement.

Mr. Moore, who was reportedly in London finishing “Sicko,” a planned exposé of the American health care system, did not respond to voice mail, e-mail messages or third-party requests for an interview; a spokeswoman for the Weinstein Company, the distributor of “Sicko,” said Mr. Moore had no comment on “Manufacturing Dissent,” and referred inquiries to a Web address, www.michaelmoore.com/books-films/f911reader/index.php?id=16as.

That link contains a refutation of a number of complaints taken up by conservatives regarding “Fahrenheit 9/11,” but the Melnyk-Caine movie isn’t really about that. “We didn’t want to refute anything,” Ms. Melnyk said. “We just wanted to take a look at Michael Moore and his films. It was only by talking to people that we found out this other stuff.”

In part the “stuff” amounts to a catalog of alleged errors — both of omission and commission — in Mr. Moore’s films, beginning with his 1989 debut, “Roger & Me.” That film largely revolved around Mr. Moore’s fruitless attempts to interview Roger Smith, then the chairman of General Motors, after his company closed plants in Mr. Moore’s birthplace, Flint, Mich.: an interview that occurred, Ms. Melnyk and Mr. Caine said, although Mr. Moore left it on the cutting-room floor.

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Ms. Melnyk and Rick Caine.Credit
Bill Towgood

“I’m still a big proponent of ‘Roger & Me,’ especially for its importance in American documentary making,” said John Pierson, the longtime producers’ representative who helped sell the film to Warner Brothers and now teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. “But it was disheartening to see some of the material in Debbie and Rick’s film. I wouldn’t say I was crushed. I’m too old to be crushed. But my students were.”

Calling the Melnyk-Caine film “unbelievably fair,” Mr. Pierson said it asks what really matters in nonfiction filmmaking: Should all documentary-making be considered subjective and ultimately manipulative, or should the viewer be able to believe what he or she sees? “I found it encouraging,” he said, “that my students were dumbstruck.”

Mr. Pierson and students in his advanced producing class have even made a project out of promoting “Manufacturing Dissent” (a title that echoes “Manufacturing Consent,” the 1992 Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick film about Noam Chomsky). They have helped to publicize the Austin premiere with slogans that include: “Michael Moore doesn’t like documentaries. That’s why he doesn’t make them.” And “It’s never been so hard to get Michael Moore in front of a camera.”

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In “Manufacturing Dissent” Mr. Caine and Ms. Melnyk — whose previous films include “Junket Whore,” about movie journalists, and “Citizen Black,” about Conrad Black — note that the scene in “Fahrenheit 9/11” in which President Bush greets “the haves, and the have-mores” took place at the annual Al Smith Dinner, where politicians traditionally make sport of themselves. Ms. Melnyk and Mr. Caine received a video of the speeches from the dinner’s sponsor, the Archdiocese of New York. “Al Gore later answers a question by saying, ‘I invented the Internet,’ ” Mr. Caine said. “It’s all about them making jokes at their own expense.”

Still, support for Mr. Moore can be found in the film, from the likes of friends like Ben Hamper, from the actress Janeane Garofalo, and even from Mr. Pierson, a self-proclaimed “flag-waver” for “Roger & Me.” Others, including the writer Christopher Hitchens, and filmmakers Albert Maysles and Errol Morris, take exception to Mr. Moore’s methods, which have involved questionable lapses in chronology and what some would call a convenient neglect of pertinent material.

There have been attacks on Mr. Moore: “Michael Moore Hates America,” a rebuttal of “Bowling for Columbine” was produced in 2004 by Mike Wilson, who says he was inspired by “righteous indignation,” but came to a more temperate conclusion. “I understood what the guy struggles with,” Mr. Wilson said. “I interviewed John Stossel of ABC and asked him how he managed to keep out of trouble with what are essentially op-ed pieces, and he said ‘Because I could get fired.’ Michael Moore doesn’t have that.”

Ms. Melnyk and Mr. Caine, who are married, admit to one fabrication of their own: They printed their own business cards before an appearance by Mr. Moore at Kent State University, identifying themselves with Toronto’s City TV and its owner, CHUM Ltd., their chief financial backer and owner of Bravo! in Canada, where the film will eventually be broadcast. (The network is no relation to the American Bravo! network.) “We weren’t employees, so we didn’t have cards,” Ms. Melnyk said. Despite their ruse, the Kent State sequence ends with them being banished from the event by Mr. Moore’s sister, Anne, who also knocks away Mr. Caine’s camera.

The incident represents in microcosm the obstacles Ms. Melnyk and Mr. Caine said they faced while trying to make their portrait of Mr. Moore. Among other incidents, they said, they were prevented from plugging into the sound board at Wayne State University during a stop on Mr. Moore’s “Slacker Uprising” tour and were kicked out of his film festival in Traverse City, Mich., while other press members were admitted.

“I don’t think he expected us to follow him around,” Ms. Melnyk said.

Mr. Caine added: “We’re bit more persistent than your average film crew that way.”